IT organizations face a challenge in managing complex storage environments with optimal performance. Load balancing is one of the known approaches helping to maintain high performance operating. Load balancing techniques enable distribution of workload across different resources in order to get improved resource utilization. The problems of implementing load balancing techniques in mass data storage systems have been recognized in the Prior Art and various systems have been developed to provide a solution as, for example:
U.S. Pat. No. 6,578,068 (Bowman-Amuah) discloses a method for distributing incoming requests to a storage system. The requests are received and stored by an activity module, which instructs a client to handle a first subset of the requests and passes a second subset of the requests on to a load balancer. The load balancer sends particular requests of the second subset to a server component determined to be most appropriate to receive the request.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,886,074 (Narayanaswamy et al.) discloses a method for load balancing a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID). Data is stored on two drives, and counters of read commands for the drives are maintained. A new read command is directed to the drive having the lowest counter.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 2002/124137 (Ulrich) discloses a system and method for enhancing disk array performance via variable-parity-based load balancing. The system and method operate on a computer storage system that includes a plurality of disk drives for storing distributed parity groups. Each distributed parity group includes storage blocks. The storage blocks include one or more data blocks and a parity block that is associated with the one or more data blocks. Each of the storage blocks is stored on a separate disk drive such that no two storage blocks from a given parity set reside on the same disk drive. The computer storage system further includes file system metadata to describe a location of each of the storage blocks. The computer storage system further includes a load-balancing module to dynamically move storage blocks of the distributed parity groups among the plurality of disk drives to balance transaction loading of the plurality of disk drives and thereby to improve throughput of the computer storage system. The load-balancing module is configured to update the file system metadata when a storage block is moved.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 2003/028720 (Lam) discloses load balancing of activities on physical disk storage devices accomplished by monitoring reading and writing operations to blocks of contiguous storage locations on the physical disk storage devices. Statistics accumulated over an interval are then used to obtain access activity values for each block and each physical disk drive.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 2004/103246 (Chatterjee et al.) discloses a system and method for increased data availability. The method includes receiving a SMART indication from a data storage device included in a plurality of data storage devices configured as a RAID array. Data from the data storage device which originated the SMART indication is replicated to a second data storage device which was not originally configured in the RAID array. The data storage device which originated the
SMART indication from the RAID array is removed, thereby resulting in the second data storage device and the plurality of data storage devices configured as a RAID array.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 2005/216591 (Sato) discloses managing storage resources in comprising a plurality of storage subsystems with different processing performance, wherein volumes are automatically relocated according to the state of use of each storage subsystem.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 2005/0015554 (Zohar et al.) discloses a data storage system having a number of caches. If one of the caches of the system is unable to retrieve data from or store data at a range of logical addresses, one or more other caches are reconfigured to retrieve data from and store at the range while continuing to retrieve data from and store at other ranges of logical addresses.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 2006/0253674 (Zohar et al.) discloses a method for operating a data storage system including a first and one or more second mass storage devices. Upon detecting an unacceptable level of activity on the first mass storage device, The data stored in the first mass storage device is transferred to the second mass storage devices, reformats the first mass storage device and, after reformatting the first mass storage device, transfers the data stored in the second mass storage devices to the first mass storage device.